Tag Archive for 'Nuclear Power'

Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor at UC Berkeley — low cost nuclear?

Published on 8/27/2010 in Nuclear Costs and Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Per’s aim is to develop really compact nuclear units with very high power densities, based on mostly well-understood technology that is deployable on the time-scale of a decade or less. The driving aim is to get these units commercialised in the near term, and to bring down costs, thereby paving the way for later widespread commercial deployment of full Generation IV designs like the LFTR and IFR, which not only achieve high burnup, but also completely close the fuel cycle.

Barry Brook and Tom Blees were invited to visit Per Peterson’s laboratory at the Nuclear Engineering Department of UC Berkeley. I would love to have been there, sigh. Anyhow, read Barry’s account, almost as good as being there.

When I visited California earlier this month, Tom Blees and I paid a visit to Prof Per Peterson and Prof Jasmina Vujic at the Nuclear Engineering Department of UC Berkeley. After chatting over lunch, Per took us on a personal tour of his lab, which was quite an experience. Per’s research focuses on development of a high-temperature reactor with an incredibly high power density. Why? In short, it’s about the money. Per’s argument — and a quite persasive one — is that if the costs of advanced reactors can be brought way down, below that of pressurised and boiling water reactors (PWRs and BWRs), then their scaled-up deployment is highly likely. The following post owes a lot to Per’s insights on this critical issue.

(…)

You’ll be rewarded for reading Barry’s complete post. Also, Per Peterson’s homepage for the PB-AHTR research is here.

How does the UCB reactor design stack up relative to current and other advanced reactor concepts (e.g., LFTR, S-PRISM)? At the 2007 MIT-Stanford Workshop on Nuclear Fission: Opportunities for Fundamental Research and Breakthrough in Fission, one of the papers by UC Berkeley’s Ehud Greenspan compares four advanced reactor classes, one of which is the PB-AHTR (class 2). Download and archive this Ehud Greenspan presentation — it is almost an encyclopedia of nuclear fuel and reactor systems, including high-performance transportation fuel production:

  1. Light-water cooled breeding reactors
  2. Liquid-salt cooled high temperature thermal reactors
  3. Nuclear battery type reactors
  4. Deployment of fast reactors without separating TRU from LWR spent fuel

We obviously will not know for sure until we have built PB-AHTR’s at commercial scale, but at least one study by ORNL indicate the capital cost should be about 70% of current LWR reactors (e.g., the Westinghouse AP-1000). BTW, Greenspan lists just one “Con” for the AHTR class, “not sustainable”. I need to read more on this, as I thought the design was sustainable (i.e., does not require mining new fissionable feedstock).

UAE: our nuclear future

Published on 8/26/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: .

The UAE “The National” reports on the startup of the four 1.4GWe reactor project at Braka:

(…) The Government says the pace of the nuclear programme is being driven by ballooning electricity demand that leaves little room for construction delays. Rapid economic development and population growth have raised Abu Dhabi’s electricity consumption as much as 10 per cent per year, forcing the Government to build a multibillion-dollar gas-fired power station nearly every year.

The growth rate, among the highest in the world, will see electricity demand double even before the first reactor comes online in 2017, according to the Government’s ambitious reactor completion schedule.

A government study concluded in April 2008 that the country’s abundant natural gas reserves, which have supplied low-cost electricity for decades, could not be develpoed quickly and cheaply enough to indefinitely fuel each new power station. Burning oil, meanwhile, would be prohibitively expensive, cutting into the emirate’s exports, officials said. Coal would be too polluting and solar power too expensive to play the dominant role in electricity generation.

With those conclusions, officials took the bureaucratic and legal steps toward nuclear power: in less than two years they concluded cooperation agreements with major reactor suppliers including the US and France, set up an independent federal regulator and awarded a US$20 billion (Dh73.46bn) contract to Korea Electric Power Corporation and its partners to build the country’s first four reactors.

Ridiculous Uranium Scare in Moldova Gets Internatonal Attention

Published on 8/26/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Massive uranium scare

Fortunately science-based observer Steve Packard is alert to idiot-based scare-mongering:

This is the kind of ignorance-based story that drives me nuts: 3 arrested in Moldova in uranium smuggling plot…

(…) I believe the uranium is most likely of the depleted variety. This photo was published in several news outlets and reports to show the uranium in question. It appears to be some kind of counter-weight or possibly a plug from a shielded cask – both of these being common uses of depleted uranium. The source of the uranium is unknown, but it may have been scavenged from a junked aircraft or from a scrap metal yard.

So is this dangerous? Absolutely, unequivocally and unquestionably NO. It’s not dangerous – at least no more so than a chunk of lead of equal size. You could possibly drop it on someone’s head, but that’s about the worst you could do with this uranium.

Read more »

Nuclear fall in: Why I’m becoming a pro-nuke nut

Published on 8/26/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: .

Scientific American writer John Horgan is advancing up the nuclear learning curve. John learned from debating Rod Adams, leading to meeting Gwyneth Cravens, and reading her book Power to Save the World.

(…) I’m feeling a lot better about living near Indian Point, less because of what I learned during my tour (although plant employees were quite informative) than because of Power to Save the World.

The 2007 book describes how Cravens morphed from a nuke-fearing greenie who in the 1980s opposed the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, where she lives, into a proponent who believes that we need nuclear power to save us from global warming and other adverse effects of fossil fuels. Cravens repeats the refrain that the risks of nuclear energy have been exaggerated; nuclear power, both civilian and military, hasn’t killed a single person in the U.S. over the past half century. But she fleshes out these statements with surprising (to me) details.

(…) I’ve always had a knee-jerk distrust of nuclear advocates, just as I have of right-wing Congressmen, psychiatric-drug shills and string theorists. But I trust Cravens and the experts she interviewed—including physicists, engineers and epidemiologists—over many years of reporting. If you’re agonizing over whether to support nuclear energy, read Cravens’s book and see if you find it as persuasive as I do. I also welcome (and expect) challenges to the assertions above.

Now, if we could just get the editors of Scientific American to do their homework…

Blue Ribbon Commission: Subcommittee on Transportation and Storage

Published on 8/23/2010 in Nuclear Power . 1 Comment Tags: , , .

One presentation caught my eye, by Dr. Clifford Singer of Univ. of Illinois. Excerpts from the summary emphasize the incentives — which seem to totally absent from all the existing law and regulation. Ensure there is competition among several states for storage operations:

Obtaining the cooperation of localities and states on siting spent nuclear fuel management facilities requires more than building trust with local communities. States having an appropriate site will view it as a valuable energy systems asset and will want financial compensation not at the level of a few percent, but measured in tenths of the cost of the entire project. If siting is really to be voluntary, it is important not to put a single state in a monopoly position of having the only licensed site. To do so will generate tension with the federal government over the level of financial benefit to the host state and within the host state over whether the final arrangement is equitable. There must be a sensible mechanism for compensating host states and a process that leads to more than one site being licensed and ready for use.

(…) Use of the Framework: Congress should set the maximum allowed Permanent Fund charges high enough to make hosting spent fuel management facilities something that several states desire rather than wish to avoid. A short list of geological repository sites in at least six states should lead to a competition to be amongst two or preferably three chosen for licensing. It is economically optimal to age spent fuel intact over a few of the c. 30 year half lives of its most intense fission product heat generators, before its final disposition. Thus, a similar number of spent fuel aging facilities should be licensed, some of which may be at repository sites. In this context spent fuel reprocessing will not be economically favorable for many decades, if ever. If a pilot scale reprocessing facility is nevertheless licensed, it should also be licensed as an indefinitely renewable aging facility, as no reprocessing facility anywhere has yet both operated as planned and removed all high-level radioactive materials from site.

‘Plan D’ for Spent Nuclear Fuel

Published on 8/23/2010 in Nuclear Power . 1 Comment Tags: .

Published by Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS), University of Illinois

Full text [PDF]

Summary

An impasse on spent nuclear fuel management would have several effects. It would render the U.S. government liable to billions of dollars in legal fees for failure to take title to spent nuclear fuel. It would result in extra costs and security risks from suboptimal management of spent fuel at reactor sites. It would also leave nuclear fuel cycle research and development without a clear roadmap. Such a situation not only would be deleterious domestically but also would undermine U.S. influence on matters related to energy and security internationally.

The reality appears to be that most U.S. spent nuclear fuel is likely to remain where it was generated for an extended period of time. Managing this situation efficiently and laying the groundwork for a functional transition to long-term spent fuel management require paying careful attention to the financial situations of nuclear reactor site owners and the host states for long-term spent fuel management facilities. These observations led to seven recommendations, each of which would each require U.S. congressional action for implementation.

This report documents the recent success achieved in reaching a consensus on how to revise U.S. management of spent nuclear fuel. This consensus was reached at a workshop held on March 16, 2009, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Organized by the university’s Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, the workshop attracted participants from nuclear engineering programs at seven Midwestern universities. In their deliberations, these participants drew upon the findings of an earlier workshop held on June 6, 2008, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy and upon interviews in Washington, D.C., with dozens of congressional staff members. All of these efforts were supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through its Science, Technology, and Security Initiative.

IEEE: survey of some new reactor designs

Published on 8/14/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Gail Marcus reviewed this August 2010 IEEE survey — Gail was disappointed that there was not more breadth and depth. That said, IEEE has contributed an overall useful survey, especially for those who are not energy policy wonks. And IEEE is a very respected organization which reaches an important audience.

(…) The IEEE Spectrum article is at least a start in the right direction. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go as far as I would have liked. And quite a few other people share that view, judging by the comments. A more serious flaw, in my view, is that the article does not provide a clear rationale for why they picked the designs they picked. Did they judge these to be the best of the crop? Were these the ones for which they had the most information? It makes a difference. The comments help in identifying some of the other potential options.

One could also argue that this article does not do an in-depth assessment of every one of the technologies. Clearly, it would not be sufficient to make a decision among the options, but that was not its purpose. It does help the reader understand in general terms some of the major issues associated with each technology, including the very important issue of its status of development.

Read more »
it’s worthwhile to read through the comments to the IEEE article. There are, of course, the usual anti-nuclear-nutjobs — but there are a number of very well-informed contributions (e.g., from Doug L. Hoffman).

India’s three-stage nuclear strategy

Published on 8/14/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

IEEE Spectrum had a very interesting 2007 interview with Sudhinder Thakur, executive director of corporate planning for the Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd. (NPCIL), a government enterprise charged with building and running the country’s nuclear power plants. If India’s power consumption grows 23 times the kWh per capita will reach U.S. levels. Excerpt.

(…)

SPECTRUM: How does the U.S. agreement to supply uranium and light-water reactors help India move to thorium and fast breeders?

ST: We have a very limited amount of uranium but plenty of thorium, so we have developed a three-stage program to exploit it. In the first stage, we load pressurized heavy-water reactors with natural uranium, which consists of 99.3 percent uranium 238 and 0.7 percent uranium 235. That 0.7 percent produces most of the power. Some of the uranium 238 does, however, get converted to plutonium, and when the spent fuel comes out, we can separate the plutonium out.

In the second stage, we load the right mix of plutonium and uranium 238 into fast breeder reactors, which produce energy and more plutonium. Later on, we put a blanket of thorium around the reactor, and some of it converts to uranium 233, which we extract. In the third stage, we use the uranium 233 as fuel.

We have enough thorium in the country to meet requirements for thousands of years, much more than our supplies of coal or other sources of fuel. So, this three-stage program has great potential, but the technologies needed for the final stage will take decades to fully develop.

SPECTRUM: What about India’s more immediate needs?

ST: We are consuming about 600 kilowatthours per capita annually, compared with 13 000 kWh per capita in the U.S., and we are importing most of our energy, in the form of oil, gas, and some coal. If we can import uranium, then we can set up these nuclear power stations based on international cooperation, in addition to our indigenous program.

We think that 20 000 to 40 000 MW of capacity can be added with this cooperative program with the U.S. in the next 30 years. It depends upon how fast—you know, sometimes these international developments go very fast and then sometimes they are very slow.

SPECTRUM: Japan and France both had fast breeder reactor programs, but neither one is operational now. Why will India’s fast breeder succeed where others have failed?

ST: The requirements of each country are different. For us, what’s important is energy self-sufficiency. Japan is interested because fast breeders use the waste left over from the first stage. And now people are realizing that at the rate we are using uranium, the world’s supply will be exhausted by the year 2050. So fuels are going to have to be reused.

(…) SPECTRUM: How much does electricity generated by your nuclear plants cost now, and will this agreement ultimately make it cheaper?

ST: Using indigenous supplies of uranium, we are competitive at distances of 800 to 1000 kilometers from the closest coal mine, because of the cost of transporting the coal. Now, suppose we had access to international fuel; then the same reactors would be competitive even much closer, and possibly they would be ”location neutral,” which means that wherever you are, you should be able to compete. With the availability of uranium at international prices, the nuclear power reactors set up with foreign cooperation will be competitive with thermal power plants located much closer to the coal mines. The tariff of our oldest power station at Tarapur (the Tarapur Atomic Power Station or TAPS-1/2) is about 2 cents per kilowatthour and the average tariff of nuclear power in the country is about 5 cents per kilowatthour.

India’s reactor strategy, inverview with thorium reactor designer

Published on 8/14/2010 in Nuclear Power . 0 Comments Tags: , , .

IEEE Spectrum offers an interesting Q and A with Ratan Kumar Sinha, the head of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Their new thorium-U233-plutonium fueled test reactor reactor will produce 300 megawatts of electricity and 500 cubic meters per day of desalinated water, and has a design life of 100 years.

Given its limited reserves of natural uranium and its abundant supply of thorium, India has chalked out a unique three-stage nuclear program. In the first stage, pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs)–similar to those used in advanced industrial countries–burn natural uranium. In the second stage, fast-breeder reactors, which other countries have tried to commercialize without success, will burn plutonium derived from standard power reactors to stretch fuel efficiency. In the key third stage, on which India’s long-term nuclear energy supply depends, power reactors will run on thorium and uranium-233 (an isotope that does not occur naturally).

Scientists and engineers at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in Mumbai, have designed a novel advanced heavy water reactor to burn thorium. They say that because no reactor in the world today uses thorium on a large scale, they will be breaking new ground. The head of the Mumbai reactor design and development group, Ratan Kumar Sinha, spoke to IEEE Spectrum’s Seema Singh in July about the challenges of and prospects for this new thorium reactor technology.

IEEE Spectrum: Why do you call this advanced heavy water reactor one of a kind?

Ratan Kumar Sinha: No reactor in the world utilizes thorium on a large scale. We are the first ones to design such a system, which we are validating through an experimental program. In April, we started a test reactor, which has a flexible configuration and allows use of a range of fuel materials; we can even physically shift the distance between fuel rods. Here we are able to simulate the reactor almost 100 percent.

Spectrum: What are the unique features in this reactor?

Sinha: While we have used the well-proven pressure-tube technology, we’ve introduced many passive safety features, a distinguishing one being the reactor’s ability to remove core heat by natural circulation of coolant under normal operating and shutdown conditions. This eliminates the need for nuclear-grade circulating pumps, which, besides providing economic advantages, enhances reliability.

We have also introduced passive shutdown on the main heat transport system in case of a failure of the wired shutdown system. Using mechanical energy from the increased steam pressure, the system injects neutron poison into the moderator [that sustains the nuclear chain reaction]. There are several other safety features, which are important, because they allow the reactor to be built close to the population.

(…) Spectrum: Even though thorium has always looked attractive theoretically, why hasn’t the technology taken off yet? What are the impediments?

Sinha: There has been interest in thorium in some other countries because of its proliferation-resistant nature, but no other country had the problem of uranium supply like India. In other countries, the economics were not in favor of thorium, so uranium became the fuel of choice.

Spectrum: Why was thorium not economical?

Sinha: Thorium has a much lower neutron multiplication rate than plutonium, and hence you cannot achieve power levels in a reactor as high as with plutonium. When burned, thorium initially acts like a blotting paper for neutrons and keeps absorbing them. But this exercise also means it is getting enriched and converted into U-233, which will pay dividends later on. Once the energy generated has reached 40 000 megawatt-days per metric ton, U-233 starts contributing many more neutrons than what has been lost in absorption by thorium. So you tend to get economic benefits of thorium if you have a fuel that can run up to 40 000 MWd/t and beyond. But most early generation reactors had lower burn-up values of around 15 000 to 20 000 MWd/t. These have, of course, risen to about 40 000 MWd/t in recent time. So the world is now thinking of thorium.

Read more » BTW, Sinha obviously understands what the fuel supply/demand curve will look like in another couple of decades given the almost certain global growth rate of nuclear power:

(…) The supply of uranium is not perpetual. With the rate at which nuclear programs are growing worldwide, it is projected that by 2028 any new power plant will not have a guaranteed lifetime of uranium supply. So, one has to go for recycling as well as thorium. I don’t see any shortcut as such.

Nuclear Energy Fallacies

Published on 8/6/2010 in Nuclear Power . Closed Tags: , , .

Toward the latter part of last century official- looking signs, like the one depicted on the front cover, sprouted on roadside poles in local government areas all around Australia. Their only real use was as a badge to identify the green political leanings of the governing body that erected them.

Thanks to Barry for the recommendations for Dr. Colin Keay’s work (these downloads now require a Scribd archive subscription):

Finally, I’d like to recommend a series of four pamphlets on nuclear energy, written a few years ago by Australian physicist Dr. Colin Keay. They’re all available now for free download, on the Scribd website, and range from 44 to 48 pages in length. The titles, in chronological order, are Nuclear Energy Gigawatts (2002; a compare-and-contrast of all major energy sources — nuclear, fossil and renewable), Nuclear Common Sense (2003; an clear and straightforward overview of nuclear energy and the nuclear fuel cycle), Nuclear Radiation Exposed (2004; a superb discussion of the fears and realities over radiation, with perhaps the best general discussion on hormesis I’ve yet seen), and Nuclear Energy Fallacies (2005). I’ll quote the blurb from that final one:

The author is a retired physicist and astronomer who, as an associate professor at the University of Newcastle for 24 years, taught nuclear and reactor physics to senior classes. These duties induced a deep suspicion of unsubstantiated claims on nuclear matters by persons and organisations promoting anti-nuclear agendas. In the interests of his students he began to identify and correct the disinformation, truth-twisting, false claims and plain lies that flood the media. As a scientist who has investigated phenomena governed by the inviolable laws of nature he finds it very difficult to understand why anti-nuclear activists refuse to believe the hard facts about energy, even when drawn to their attention on many occasions. In the interests of a better future for Australia it is imperative that disinformation and fallacies are dealt with accurately by presenting, as answers to them, the authentic verifiable facts surrounding nuclear electricity generation. He has no past or present connection with the nuclear industry.

Be sure to read these four pamphlets, and distribute the links to your friends and associates. This key information MUST be more widely appreciated by the public and policy makers, alike.

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